Reset Switch
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Claudia always has a plan.


By hour two of their vigil, Claudia was starting to get a little antsy. By hour three, she'd started poking at the innards of her Farnsworth again – nothing serious, just swapping out resistors – which made Myka do the cookie-depriving glare she normally reserved for Pete. It also made H.G. come a little closer and stare over her shoulder like she was memorizing each component, which, hey, little unsettling coming from a lady who freaked Artie out so much. So Claudia stopped doing the only marginally interesting thing in the room, and spent the rest of hour three pacing, practicing her mournful sighs, and composing variations on the theme of "Hey, this is kind of boring. Also, I'm going to kill Pete for touching that artifact."

By the time hour four rolled around, she'd hatched a fiendish scheme.

"So," she said.

H.G. glowered. "It's been established."

Myka glared. "Yeah. Boring. Kill Pete. We get it."

"_So_," Claudia said again, with feeling, and sat down on the floor, which was weirdly cold. Huh. That probably didn't bode well. "We're stuck here until Artie and Pete, I don't know, recombobulate or whatever."

Perhaps sensing a reprieve from said boredom, Myka crouched beside her. "Any attempt to leave the room could mean their atoms wind up scattered across half the planet," she said, like maybe they'd all forgotten that particular fact at some point in the past four hours.

"They'll be fine," H.G. said. She was tinkering with a particularly awesome-looking grappler hook, which, it had to be said, Claudia coveted madly. "As artifacts go, this particular playbook in this particular room should be harmless. It just likes to make people wait for indeterminate amounts of time on flimsy pretexts so that amusing and psychologically revealing conversations can ensue."

Claudia looked at the walls, which stubbornly refused to be anything interesting whatsoever. "You're absolutely sure Waiting for Godot premiered here?"

Myka and H.G. did that tandem-glower thing again, which was sufficiently intimidating that Claudia used her professional judgement as an apprentice Warehouse agent to deem the subject dropped. "Okay, okay," she said, and then added, " but there's no reason we have to be miserable while we wait."

"I'm okay with miserable," Myka said.

"What did you have in mind?" H.G. said, at exactly the same time.

This time, they directed their death-glares at each other, which was a bit of an improvement. Claudia took it as a sign of imminent weakness, and went in for the kill. "I have a plan," she said, and this time they both listened.

By the time Artie and Pete reappeared, Claudia, H.G., and Myka were in the process of digging into the Chinese food – it had been a bit tricky, getting the delivery guy to come backstage and very definitely not enter the room himself. The pizza earlier had been a little easier, since the guy had found them all ridiculously hot, and Claudia suspected he'd probably have tried his best to turn into a ferret if they'd asked. Sliding the pizzas across the room to them was hardly a stretch.

"-and whatever you do, don't touch that," Artie was saying, and then he and Pete clammed up as they got wise to the fact that they'd just sparkled into being after a fairly considerable holiday from existence.

Claudia glanced at Myka, who descended on Artie with a beaming grin. "You're all right! What a relief."

Pete looked baffled. "You're having a party without us? What exactly-"

With expert timing, Claudia jumped in, ignoring his hurt expression at the interruption. "Artie! You're all right!"

"Of course I'm all right," Artie said, and cast a glare at H.G, but Claudia was pretty sure it was just an Artie-glare, more bluster than anything.

"What am I, chopped liver?" Pete said. Claudia ignored him.

Artie was still glowering at H.G. "I get the idea she knew exactly what would happen when we walked into this room."

H.G. raised an eyebrow. "Which is clearly why I remained here with the others for the past seven hours, waiting for you to return."

Claudia looked over to Myka again. This was the crucial part, and would have to be executed with poise, grace, aplomb, and other dainty descriptors. "Artie?" she said, and Claudia fought down the urge to do a little victory fist-pump at the perfect little hesitation in her voice. "Where's Pete?"

Everyone went quiet, except Pete. "What do you mean, where's Pete? Pete's here!" He moved toward Myka, who was doing a seriously amazing job of ignoring him, considering he'd started waving both hands in her face. "Hello?"

Claudia took her cue, met Artie's glance. "Yeah, shouldn't he have come back with you?"

Give the old guy a cigar; he caught on almost immediately. "Huh," he said, and looked around. "I could have sworn he was right next to me when I vanished."

"What?" Pete poked Myka, who made a dramatic show of looking around for the source of the touch.

"I suppose it's possible he never rematerialized," H.G. said, blandly. "His atoms could very well be scattered across half the planet by now."

Myka winced. "Ouch."

"Huh," said Artie.

"Well, that sucks," said Claudia.

"What the hell?" said Pete, and started doing a frantic little look-I'm-still-in-existence dance that reminded Claudia of nothing so much as a certain disturbingly popular dancing-rodent website of the late nineties. "Myka? Hello?"

He seemed to get it about a split second before Myka gave an undignified snort and burst into giggles, which got H.G. to clearing her throat and trying to hide a grin, which even made Artie break into a smile of his own. With a groan, Pete sank down to the floor, head in his hands. "Oh, very funny, guys. Very mature."

Claudia patted him on the back, adopted a tone somewhere between a second-grade teacher and Yoda. "And this is what happens when we touch artifacts we're not supposed to touch. A bitch karma is, hmm?"

"A valuable lesson if ever there was one," Artie said, with the particular edge in his voice that meant he'd be simmering for _weeks_ after this one.

And as they were leaving the room – Pete trailing behind, head hanging, humming the sad-Charlie-Brown song whenever Artie tried to lecture him – H.G. sidled up next to Claudia on one side, Myka on the other. "Hey," Myka said, "Did you get it?"

Claudia held up the mini-camcorder she'd improvised from entirely non-vital parts of her Farnsworth – she made a quick mental note never to mention that particular fact to Artie – and smiled the smile of one whose evil works were done. "The second he tries to touch another thing that should never be touched is the second his dance goes viral on YouTube."

H.G. raised an eyebrow. "Not all progress is overrated," she said.

Myka grinned. "Agreed."

Claudia stopped in her tracks, then remembered who was behind them and sped up again. "Whoa, hang on. Just had a thought. What if he likes it?"

H.G. blinked. "Who could possibly enjoy seeing an embarrassing moment projected for the world to see?"

Claudia looked at Myka, who was facepalming an epic facepalm that would put all the textually rendered Picards on 4chan to shame. "That would be Pete."

"There's only one option, then," Claudia said, and paused, dramatically. "Plan B." She paused again, somewhat less dramatically. "Which we don't have yet, so it's obvious that one more night of delivery food and evil scheming is needed."

"Possibly two," Myka said.

They both looked at H.G., who stared back for a long moment, then smiled, and said, "Three. Definitely. At least."

From behind them, Pete said, "Why do I feel like someone just walked over my grave?"

A few weeks in, they stopped plotting against Pete, but the traditional girls' nights in had expanded to include Leena, Dr. Calder (when she was in town and not spending time with Artie, and Claudia's brain so did not want to go there), and even, under careful self-censorial conditions on the part of everyone involved in top-secret artifact retrieval, Kelly Hernandez.

"You know what?" Claudia said, in the tone of voice that she knew the others recognized as evil-scheme-ahoy. "Someone's missing." She then added, "Die, die, die!", because they were cycling through Pete's old school gaming systems, and H.G. had caught on to Mortal Kombat entirely too quickly.

"No," Leena said, and Claudia wondered, not for the first time, if there maybe wasn't something to that whole aura thing after all. "No way." She made a grab for Claudia's controller. "Come on, it's my turn already."

With grace, ease, and a modicum of flailing, Claudia managed to fight her off. "One more round. Besides, has anyone thought to ask her? Maybe Mrs. Frederic is just dying to spend a night away from her creepy bodyguards and as-yet undisclosed familial unit."

Myka winced. "I'm with Leena. That seems like a terrible idea."

H.G. gave a disturbingly evil cackle. "And the winning streak continues unabated," she crowed.

Kelly leaned in and swiped the controller from Claudia before she could pass it off to Leena. "Hey," she said, already getting that glazed-eye gamer look that Claudia felt just a bit proud of inducing in all of them. Her little gamer chicks, all grown up. "Who's Mrs. Frederic?"

They shut up.

True to form, Mrs. Frederic never showed, and then there was that whole thing in Egypt, and everything started to unravel from there. Even after that, though, Claudia was occasionally able to think of H.G. without getting pissed off, like it was all a game, like the whole world was just going to go "Game Over", and let them start again. No harm, no foul, no betrayal, no missing Myka.

She'd taken to hanging around the office at night – if Artie had figured it out from the security logs, he didn't seem to mind. It was quiet. Normal, or what passed for normal.

Tonight, though, something felt different, kind of electric.

She knew without turning around that Mrs. Frederic was behind her, staring that starey stare. "What?" It came out a little more harshly than she'd intended, a little less harshly than she really wanted.

Mrs. Frederic was really freaking good at the silence thing, so after a while, Claudia turned to face her. No bodyguards, no forbidding glower. "I thought you could use the company," she said.

And, okay, so they didn't exactly talk so much as not talk at all, sitting in the office, staring out the window at the quiescent Warehouse beyond. It shouldn't have been comforting – what it should have been was creepy, especially given the whole all-this-could-be-yours talk they'd had back when everything had been going down. It wasn't, though, and by the end of the night, when Claudia had turned to see that Mrs. Frederic was nowhere to be seen, she felt a bit better.

So hey, maybe she'd keep hoping for that reset switch. Maybe it wouldn't work out. Maybe it was a stupid, impossible thing to wish for, a ferret-in-a-tea-kettle kind of wish. Maybe she didn't care.

If there was one thing the Warehouse was really, really good at producing, it was the impossible.


End file.
